An Amish horse team stands placidly on John Sumwalt’s farm in Richland County, Wisconsin, in 2015. (Courtesy Photo)
Special to United Methodist Insight | July 9, 2026
One morning, when we still lived on the farm, I looked out the front window and saw that the barn door was open and a horse was standing over by the corn crib, not ten feet from the road. It wasn’t my horse, but still I had that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
We had rented out a stall to an Amish neighbor to board his horses for a month while he was doing some logging nearby. He paid the rent with several loads of firewood. As a bonus he spread some of that high octane Percheron exhaust on the garden, so it was a good deal all around.
The neighbor arrived within a few minutes to tend to the wayward horse, so it all ended well. But that sinking feeling brought back memories of all those times in my youth when somebody left a door or a gate unlocked and the cows got out, usually onto the road, and almost always at the most inconvenient time. Chasing cows at three o’clock in the morning is not fun, especially when your school bus is due to arrive at 7:00 a.m.
We came home recently after being gone all day to discover that the patio doors off the dining room were wide open. The wooden doors warp in the winter and we had forgotten to turn the bolt lock. Again, there was that sinking feeling as I realized that we had put ourselves at risk. It frightens us when we discover that we have left a door open, and yet the open door can sometimes be our salvation.
Psychiatrist and spiritual writer Thomas Moore says that, in psychotherapy with his clients, he has heard many "dreams of doors left ajar and windows cracked open. The dreamer was deathly afraid of who or what might come in because of this negligence, and of course as a therapist I suspected that whoever it was, was probably someone useful or necessary." Moore quotes one of Emily Dickinson’s poems:
The Soul should always stand ajar
That if Heaven inquire
He will not be obliged to wait
And then Moore adds: "Life needs a point of entry, a crack in our defenses.... The door ajar is yet another image for ... caring for the soul. It is not a project, as is the job of personal growth or self-improvement. It is not so much something we do as it is something done to us. Our role is to stand out of the way or allow a point of entry….”
It is not easy to stand out of the way or allow a point of entry when we have experienced some great hurt in our lives. Very often after a tragedy or a trauma we are inclined to say, "I'm never going to let myself get hurt like that again," and we lock out everyone and everything that might possibly hurt us.
We have all known people who, in such circumstances, have stopped seeing friends or refused any kind of social invitation. Most of us have done this at one time or another. We think that if we lock all the doors we can keep ourselves perfectly safe. But there is no such thing as “perfectly safe” as Leonard Cohen used to sing:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
The Rev. John Sumwalt (Courtesy Photo)
The Rev. John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and old farm kid. He is the author of “Shining Moments: Visions of the Holy in Ordinary Lives.” Email him.